September 2010
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Category: Sysadmin
Getting really good at moving WordPress around
Written by Jeff
Friday, 02 October 2009 21:13
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Two of my latest projects revolve around WordPress. Both were developed on a staging server, and they needed to be moved to their new homes once development was done.

This is not nearly as hard as one would think… As long as you are comfortable with dumping MySQL databases, editing the dump and restoring it to the new server. Vi as usual was my friend. I had to do global search and replace of the urls and system paths to match the new home.

The rest is even easier. just copy all the wordpress files into there new home, edit the wp-config.php file to reflect the new database/password info. Do some quick sanity tests and I was done. With one exception. I ran into two plugins that lost their settings in the transition. Fixing was as simple as disabling/enabling the plugins to reset to the default settings and customizing as needed. Still looking at the db dump to try and figure out what happened, with little luck so far. I will however prevail, even if I have to ask for help. :-)

 
A few of my experiences with Snow leopard.
Written by Jeff
Monday, 07 September 2009 08:50
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I want to mention two items that I have not seen much discussion about with snow leopard.

The first thing I want to mention is that I am pleasantly surprised with how cool my Macbook Pro seems to be running after the upgrade. As I am writing this, my Macbooks overall temp is a mere 113 degrees F. Normally while playing music and all my normal apps are open, I see around 140 degrees F. This is interesting since at the same time everything seems a bit quicker then before.

The second is a gripe, a major one for me at least. The so called Cisco vpn support is only partial. It does not support UDP NAT tunneling. The VPNs that I connect to use UDP. Yes I do have a working Cisco VPN client that now works. But Apple got my hopes up that I would be able to connect to my VPNs without having to run a seperate client, only to be dashed against the rocks of disappointment. I really hope that they get this fixed and put in the next patch.

Overall I am very pleased with this update. I had very little problems with compatibility with my most important applications (with the exception of the cisco vpn client.). The system is faster, and even seems to run cooler.

 
Software RAID: Creating a RAID array in Gentoo
Written by Jeff
Sunday, 18 January 2009 07:14
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Today I was tasked with converting an existing Gentoo box into a Samba server. This box will be used to store and share documents, but it did not have enough storage for the task. So instead of just adding another drive, I added two drives with the intention of creating a Software RAID 1 array with the drives. This will help to protect the data from hardware issues, and combined with regular backups they should be fairly well protected from user error.

I chose to go Software rather then a hardware controller due to budget constraints. Since I have not created a Software RAID array before, I figured that I may as well document the process.

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